from the the-TV-revolution-will-not-be-televised dept

For years now, media reports have suggested that Apple has dreamed of offering a disruptive broadband TV streaming service that rattles the status quo. The problem for Apple (and countless companies before it) has been that the broadcasters in charge of said status quo haven't historically been willing to budge on the kind of flexible licensing needed to make this dream a reality. That has resulted in year after year of Apple TV service rumors that never materialize as Apple repeatedly ran face first into licensing negotiations. Similarly, cable operators, wary of Apple getting the same kind of power it now wields in the music industry and losing set top revenues, haven't been keen on Apple's proposals for Apple-made set top boxes.

Just about a year ago, the Wall Street Journal ran a story stating that Apple was in negotiations with Comcast regarding an internet TV service that would get priority over Comcast's network. One year later, and a new Wall Street Journal report notes that while a new Apple TV service is finally slated to launch this fall (and the Apple rumor gods really, really mean it this time), it's going to likely be without Comcast/NBC Universal content. Why? Apple insiders claim Comcast is stringing the company along to delay Apple while it focuses on its own efforts:

"For now, the talks don’t involve NBCUniversal, owner of the NBC broadcast network and cable channels like USA and Bravo, because of a falling-out between Apple and NBCUniversal parent company Comcast Corp., the people familiar with the matter said. Apple and Comcast were in talks as recently as last year about working together on a streaming television platform that would combine Apple’s expertise in user interfaces with Comcast’s strength in broadband delivery. Apple came to believe that Comcast was stringing it along while the cable giant focused on its own X1 Web-enabled set-top box, the people said."

Meanwhile, Apple's pretty clearly realizing the company needs to ease off of its own (often draconian and bizarre) control demands if it's going to get a foothold in the broadcast and TV industry, as the sort of success and control Apple enjoys in wireless simply isn't going to be replicated in cable without some major concessions. Insiders suggest Apple's willing to go the extra mile to get cable operators and broadcasters on board, including sharing more viewer data than Netflix traditionally does:

"The company is willing to share details on who its viewers are, what they watch and when they watch it to entice broadcast networks and others to go along with the service, sources said...Apple, which is known for tightly controlling its ecosystem, is taking a more hands-off approach with programmers, such as letting them decide whether they want to air ads. "They’re allowing a lot more decision-making by the content owner," said one source familiar with the talks, adding that Apple has told potential partners, "It’s up to you, whatever you guys want to do."

Despite a decade of the cable and broadcast industry fighting internet video tooth and nail, 2015 actually appears to be the year internet video gains meaningful traction anyway. Whether that's through Dish's Sling TV, HBO Now or Sony's Playstation Vue, we're finally starting to see some broader choices when it comes to TV packages and pricing. As for Comcast getting in the way of this progress, it's very possible the FCC and DOJ may approve their merger but impose some conditions that they play nice. Of course whether those conditions are intelligent, meaningful or actually enforced is another question entirely.

from the well-that's-not-very-nice dept

You may have heard the news recently about how a drunk employee of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (can't make this crap up) accidentally flew a DJI Phantom II drone onto White House property, leading to a general collective freakout over the security implications of these personal helicopters. In response to this, President Obama has called for more drone regulations -- which may or may not make sense -- but it needs to be remembered that the FAA has been refusing to actually release any rules for quite some time.

"The updated firmware (V3.10) will be released in coming days and adds a No-Fly Zone centered on downtown Washington, DC and extends for a 25 kilometer (15.5 mile) radius in all directions. Phantom pilots in this area will not be able to take off from or fly into this airspace."

Even if you think it's perfectly reasonable to ban drone flights in downtown DC (a different discussion for a different day...), it should be very concerning that the company you bought your product from can magically make it that much less useful on demand without you being able to do a damn thing about it. What if you happen to live in that no-fly zone, and you bought it to use for personal reasons at a local park. You're completely out of luck because an overreaction resulted in the company breaking something you thought you bought.

Sometimes, the fact that devices you buy can be updated on the fly has benefits -- like the stories of Tesla upgrading its cars to make them better even long after people bought them. That's neat. But, it still seems immensely troubling that something you bought can be turned into a paperweight (in certain areas) by the company you bought it from.

from the podcasting dept

Last week we launched our new Podcast. If you haven't yet subscribed, please do. You'll find all the episodes on Techdirt and on Soundcloud, though the best way is to subscribe via what ever podcatching software you use, so the file will magically show up for you when it's ready. For that, you can subscribe via iTunes or the RSS feed.

This week's podcast is actually a little different -- because it just so happened that I was scheduled to be at the pii 2014 Conference -- Privacy Identity and Innovation Conference -- held in Palo Alto, interviewing venture capitalist Brad Burnham (from Union Square Ventures) on stage. So, we took that interview, and turned it into this week's podcast. The official topic of the discussion was "The Paradox of Data Sharing" but it went way beyond that, getting into a discussion on user control over data and whether or not companies would give up that control.

Special thanks to Brad Burnham for taking part and also to the team at pii for inviting me, and letting us use the recording for the podcast. I highly recommend their events. They've put on great events for years, and this was another excellent one. Also, I do need to apologize about the sound quality. Something happens about a third of the way into the interview that messed with the sound levels. We've tried to correct for it as much as possible, but because of it there's a lot more of a "hiss" noise than we'd normally like. Hopefully the discussion is interesting enough that it's not too distracting.

from the dangeorus dept

Over the weekend, it came out that two giant pharmacy chains, Rite Aid and CVS, had started blocking Apple Pay, the massively hyped new payment system from Apple that has received much praise for its ease of use. The product had worked for about a week before the two companies started blocking such near field communication (NFC) payments (which also takes out other NFC payment options like Google Wallet). While Rite Aid gave a vague and slightly ridiculous explanation -- that it is "still in the process of evaluating our mobile payment options" -- pretty much everyone knows the truth. A bunch of retailers, led by Walmart, have been creating their own mobile payment system called CurrentC, which cuts out the credit card companies. But, it also builds in all the tracking and spying features of store loyalty cards, expanded across all merchant partners. Apple Pay lets people remain anonymous.

In short: CurrentC lets merchants (1) cut out credit card transaction fees and (2) get more and more data on shoppers. No wonder they want to block out other options.

All of these moves should be concerning. They're clearly not being done with the consumer in mind. Nearly everyone who's played with Apple Pay has agreed that the system is a huge leap ahead for mobile payments in terms of ease of use. Instead, we're seeing giant organizations looking to team up to keep competitors out of the market. At the very least, this should raise serious antitrust issues. But it also demonstrates, in a different sphere, why net neutrality is such a concern. When you have large companies that can effectively collude to block or kill certain powerful and useful apps and services, it hinders and blocks important innovations, leaving consumers significantly worse off. Not only are they left with fewer choices and lower quality apps and services, but it also pushes consumers into services -- like CurrentC -- that take away their privacy.

from the protect-that-brand dept

For many years, we've written about questionable activities by the Olympics, usually focusing on the organization's insanely aggressive approach to intellectual property, which could be summed up as "we own and control everything." Yes, the Olympics requires countries to pass special laws that protect its trademarks and copyrights beyond what standard laws allow. Of course, this is really much more about control and money. It's simply shining a light on just how corrupt the whole Olympic setup is. For decades, the Olympics has tried to hide this basic truth, and it has always been able to get various cities and countries to actively compete to suffer through the Olympics requirements, often with promises of big money in tourism and local business as a result. But it looks like jig may be up.

Certainly not Oslo, Norway, not even at the bargain rate of an estimated $5.4 billion in a nation of just five million people. It once wanted desperately to host the 2022 Winter Olympics and its bid was so perfect that it was considered the favorite to win. Then the country held a vote earlier this year and 55.9 percent of Norwegians opposed.

Wednesday the Norwegian government effectively pulled the bid. Norwegians are known for the ability to cross country ski really fast and being so friendly they beg visitors to come experience their picturesque nation. Since this involved the IOC however, they decided against having visitors come experience their picturesque nation to watch them cross country ski really fast.

They aren't alone. Previous finalist Krakow, Poland, saw 70 percent voter opposition and pulled its application. A majority felt the same way in Germany and Switzerland, killing bids in Munich and St. Moritz respectively. In Sweden the majority party rejected funding the proposed games in Stockholm.

Plenty of other countries didn't even bother thinking about it. As Wetzel points out, basically the only two countries interested are authoritarian regimes:

Essentially the only places interested in hosting the 2022 games are countries where actual citizens aren't allowed a real say in things – communist China and Kazakhstan, a presidential republic that coincidentally has only had one president since it split from the old USSR in 1989.

To sum it up:

Essentially the entire world has told the IOC it's a corrupt joke.

Don't hold back:

The IOC has billions of dollars laying around and billions more coming because to most people the Olympics is just a television show and the ratings are so high that the broadcast rights will never go down. The IOC doesn't pay the athletes. It doesn't share revenue with host countries. It doesn't pay for countries to send their athletes. It doesn't lay out any construction or capital costs. It doesn't pay taxes.

It basically holds caviar rich meetings in five star hotels in the Alps before calling it a day. That and conduct weak investigations into corruption charges of the bidding process, of course. "No evidence uncovered" is on a win streak.

It's a heck of a racket.

Except now the racket may be ending. Except for China and Kazakhstan. Wetzel's conclusion is spot on:

So China or Kazakhstan it is, the last two suckers on earth willing to step up to this carnival barker.

One lucky nation will win. The other will host the 2022 Winter Olympics.

The Olympics are from another era -- one of top down, "we control and own everything while paying none" variety. We've seen those types of businesses failing in lots of other arenas -- and now it may be happening to the Olympics as well.

from the enough-is-enough dept

Last month, we wrote about a troubling decision by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to give control over the new .pharmacy domain to big pharma -- thus allowing it to lock out sites around the world that threaten its generous profit margins. An article in the journal "Globalization and Health" warns that something similar could be about to happen in the realm of public health:

In just a few weeks, the Internet could be expanded to include a new .health generic top-level domain name run by a for-profit company with virtually no public health credentials -- unless the international community intervenes immediately. This matters to the future of global public health as the "Health Internet" has begun to emerge as the predominant source of health information for consumers and patients.

The paper, which is open access, and can therefore be read for free in its entirety, gives some hypothetical examples of what could happen:

http://www.[smoking].[health](potentially purchased by a tobacco company)

http://www.[cancer].[doctor](potentially purchased by unscrupulous vendors catering to the desperate dying)

The paper's authors explain:

Despite this increasing use and reliance on online health information that may have inadequate quality or reliability, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) recently announced it intends to move forward with an auction to award the exclusive, 10 year rights to the .health generic top-level domain name. This decision is being made over the protests of the World Medical Association, World Health Organization, and other stakeholders, who have called for a suspension or delay until key questions can be resolved.

ICANN responded to those concerns by asking the International Chamber of Commerce to decide whether a company, rather than a health organization, should be allowed to run the .health domain. No surprise what the outcome was:

a rejection of challenges filed by ICANN’s own independent watchdog and others, such that ICANN's Board decided in June 2014 that there are "no noted objections to move forward" in auctioning the .health generic top-level domain name to the highest bidder before the end of the year.

"No noted objections" if you exclude important chunks of the world's medical community, that is. Or perhaps ICANN simply meant "no noted objections from the companies that stand to gain the most from controlling this lucrative domain". The paper's authors conclude:

we call for an immediate moratorium/suspension of the ICANN award/auction process in order to provide the international public health community time to ensure the proper management and governance of health information online.

In fact, we need to go much further. Rather than simply calling for a moratorium on the auction of these new domains, we should be calling for ICANN itself to be abolished, and replaced with an organization that is concerned with maximizing the global benefits of running the Internet domain system and not, as presently seems the case, with maximizing the profits of a few lucky companies. ICANN has had long enough to show that it is a worthy guardian of this unique and critical resource; it has failed to do so. Time to get rid of it.

from the an-enlightened-view dept

The musician Moby has long been an outspoken critic of the old recording industry. He's been a big fan of giving away works for free (and noting that he's made quite a bit of money from music he's made available for free) and has argued strongly against the old gatekeepers. He's criticized their anti-innovation views, suggested the RIAA should disband for suing music fans, and said he can't wait for the major label gatekeepers to die.

So it shouldn't be too surprising that Moby happily teamed up with BitTorrent to release his latest album as a BitTorrent bundle for free (you just have to provide an email address). But here's the more surprising part. Not only is he happily making it available for free, but he's actually fine with people profiting from potential remixes or other uses of the music. As he explained in a recent interview with Mashable:

Are people really free to do whatever they want? Can they sell their recordings?

I met with the BitTorrent people and they were asking, "What if someone comes up with their own remix and they sell it?" They were wondering what I would want them to do with the money. And my response was that they could take their friends out to dinner or give money to their favorite charity. Even if I make the stems, if they made the effort to make the remix, they should be the ones to profit from it.

This is a really enlightened view. Even among people who are accepting of how to use free in a business model, we still see artists get uptight about "commercial use" -- even though it's often not entirely clear what qualifies as commercial use. We've long advocated that more people should be open to the idea of allowing commercial use of their works, as the potential benefits for everyone -- including the artist and fans -- could be great. I recognize this still makes some artists (who otherwise support remix and open culture) nervous, but I think as we get more examples of artists who allow for commercial use, and see how well it works, that we'll see more artists get comfortable with allowing others to profit as well.

The rest of the Moby interview is worth reading as well. He points out that artists who adapt aren't worried about infringement:

Artists who are adaptable are doing fine. A musician who makes records, tours, DJs, remixes, does music for video games and films is doing fine. If you can learn how to adapt — it's really weird and unhealthy when people talk about restricting progress to accommodate the inability of people to adapt. Every industry has been impacted by [changes in technology] in both negative and positive ways, but I feel like to complain is pointless. I love Thom Yorke, but when I heard him complaining about Spotify, I'm like, "You're just like an old guy yelling at fast trains." I love anything that enables people to have more music in their lives.

He also talks about how great other services like Spotify, SoundCloud and Pandora are -- and notes that he's actively lobbied Congress not to restrict such services. He also talks about how ridiculous it was when his old label, EMI, tried to control everything to prevent infringement:

It was about 7 or 8 years ago when I was on EMI, and someone at EMI business affairs contacted my manager and told him that I wasn't allowed to play my own music when I DJ'ed because they didn't want people in the audience pirating it. This was back in the days of the Nokia flip phone. If someone recorded a song in a nightclub it would be the worst sounding recording you could possibly imagine. You probably wouldn't even be able to identify the song. That seemed like nonsense to me.

Instead, he notes, that wonderful things happen when you stop focusing so much on control, and let creativity and innovation flow:

My approach is to not try and control it at all. I really like the idea of not just giving people finished content. It's giving them something that if they choose to they can manipulate and play with however they want. There's absolutely no restrictions on it and that makes me happy. When people try to control content in the digital world, there’s something about that that seems kind of depressing to me. The most interesting results happen when there is no control. I love the democratic anarchy of the online world.

from the well,-duh dept

It appears that Kevin Spacey gets what so many of us have been saying for over a decade: piracy isn't so much a problem as it is a statement of demand from users. And the way to "beat" piracy is to do a better job of offering fans what they want, in a manner they want it, at a reasonable price. Spacey recently gave a talk in Edinburgh in which he discussed the success of House of Cards, the "TV show" that he released via Netflix with all episodes coming out at once. First he discussed the ridiculous hoops that regular networks wanted them to go through, having to first film a pilot and go through the hell of "pilot season" that every network does each year, but then he made the same basic point that many of us have been making for so long:

Here's the key part:

Clearly the success of the Netflix model, releasing the entire season of House of Cards at once, proved one thing: the audience wants the control. They want the freedom. If they want to binge... we should let them binge.... And through this new form of distribution, we have demonstrated that we have learned the lesson that the music industry didn't learn: give people what they want, when they want it, in the form they want it in, at a reasonable price and they'll more likely pay for it rather than steal it. Well, some will still steal it, but I think we can take a bite out of piracy.

Ignoring the misleading use of "steal," he's making exactly the right point. Nothing (absolutely nothing) does away with all copyright infringement. But if you can get a huge number of people to give you money, it doesn't matter. And the best way to get more people to give you money (and, in fact, to give you more money) is to give people more of what they want. That includes good content, but also convenience, ease of use, and reasonable pricing.

He goes on to say a few more things worth listening too, including the fact that people want good stories, whether they're in movies, TV shows, video games or something else, and the entertainment industry has a real opportunity to deliver it.

The clip is five minutes long and worth watching. The point, as we've been saying for years, is not to justify "piracy" or infringement, but to show that the "piracy" problem might not be a problem at all if you can give people a good reason to buy. Spacey did that with House of Cards, and it's good to see more people realizing that piracy isn't the problem, but the symptom -- and the solution is a combination of good content, innovation, and recognizing that you need to treat the fans right, rather than as criminals.

from the why-they-fight-so-hard-for-anti-circumvention dept

A whole bunch of people have been submitting Ian Hickson's writeup on the true purpose of DRM. Given how many people have submitted it, perhaps you've seen it already, but there are some really good points in there. His main thesis is that the debates over DRM tend to focus on the wrong thing. The anti-DRM crowd points out that DRM does not and cannot stop copying. Supporters of DRM say that's not true. Hickson agrees that DRM does not stop copying, but he argues that the purpose of DRM has never really been about stopping copying, but about gaining control over software and hardware tools that play content:

The purpose of DRM is not to prevent copyright violations.

The purpose of DRM is to give content providers leverage against creators of playback devices.

Content providers have leverage against content distributors, because distributors can't legally distribute copyrighted content without the permission of the content's creators. But if that was the only leverage content producers had, what would happen is that users would obtain their content from those content distributors, and then use third-party content playback systems to read it, letting them do so in whatever manner they wanted.

He provides a few examples, such as how DVD players force you to watch "unskippable" ads, how services like Netflix can try to limit you from watching the same movie simultaneously on two devices, and how if you buy a movie on iTunes, and want to then watch it on a non-iPhone, you'll have to buy it again. As he notes none of those things are really about copyright violations.

In all three cases, nobody has been stopped from violating a copyright. All three movies are probably available on file sharing sites. The only people who are stopped from doing anything are the player providers -- they are forced to provide a user experience that, rather than being optimised for the users, puts potential future revenues first (forcing people to play ads, keeping the door open to charging more for more features later, building artificial obsolescence into content so that if you change ecosystem, you have to purchase the content again).

If you're wondering why copyright holders are soooooooo desperate to have anti-circumvention provisions in copyright law, this is why. In the past, we'd pointed out that it didn't make sense for the movie studios and record labels to be so focused on anti-circumvention/digital locks, since if people are violating copyright law (such as by reproducing or distributing copies), existing copyright law already covers that. So why add in a separate provision all about circumvention -- and then be so focused on making sure the same provision exists in all laws around the globe? It seemed silly, because the only "additional" benefit it seemed to be providing was to outlaw legal forms of copying, since everything else was already covered under existing law.

However, Hickson's argument explains much more clearly why anti-circumvention provisions are seen as an absolute necessity. It has nothing to do with copying, and everything to do with controlling the players so as to limit the kind of innovation they can provide. It's basically a de facto veto power over new technologies. And, really, that puts a bunch of other statements in context as well. Remember how former Copyright Register Ralph Oman was saying that new player technologies should be illegal until Congress approved them? Yeah, same basic thing.

All of this shows a legacy copyright industry that is so focused on holding back innovation so that they have a veto right and control over the pace of innovation. That, of course, is bad for the economy, bad for the public and bad for society. Innovation is important in growing the economy, and due to silly laws around DRM, we are purposely holding it back.

from the great-schism? dept

Techdirt covered the WCIT circus in Dubai in some depth last year, since important issues were at stake. As many feared, after a moment of farce, it became clear that a serious schism in the ITU was opening up -- between those who wanted the Internet largely left alone to carry on much as before, with the possibly naïve hope that it might act as a vehicle of freedom, and those who wanted it regulated more closely, certain it could become an even better instrument of control.

Almost everyone has fled the organization except for a few established participants from China and Korea and their partners. Pretty much all of industry together with the G55 nations [who refused to sign the WCIT treaty] have left.

Just as telling is the subject-matter:

The contributions predominantly deal with the mechanics of pervasive surveillance and content control. This includes DPI mechanisms and use cases, filtering of content to local networks, control of individual user mobile phones, controls on peer-to-peer services, extensive regulatory controls on cloud computing facilities, and Big Data Analytics for extracting every nuance about individual users from real-time communications and stored data.

As Rutkowski rightly notes, given this continuing descent into police-state territory, there are now two paths for the ITU. The first is to pull back from the brink, and to return to a consensus-based approach that allows the G55 nations to participate in the development of basic Internet standards -- not those predominantly designed for surveillance.

Alternatively, the G89 nations who did sign the WCIT treaty may decide it is more important for their sections of the Internet to be firmly under their control than for there to be a single, unified set of Internet standards for the world. The schism would be formalized, with a more open G55 Internet linking up as best it could with the more closed G89 network. That would be a tragedy for humanity, but on the basis of the WCIT conference and the developments since then, it's certainly not something that can be ruled out.